1. Setting aside the fact that the technocratic dystopia of Silicon Valley is a beyond terrible example to hold up of how anything should run, you completely gloss over the fact that it is the influence of the corporations in places like Silicon Valley that are precisely responsible for the gridlock in Congress. They bought and sold our legislators until the democratic body that we need to make laws for our society became nothing but a marketplace for corporate interests. The two are not competing businesses on opposite sides of the country with superior v. inferior modes of operating, they are tasked with performing qualitatively different jobs and the dysfunction of one can be directly tied to the influence of the other. You’re like a European ex-empire looking down on countries in Africa after having raped them for centuries. You’re completely oblivious to the fact that your “class” is responsible for Congress’s problems.

2. Don’t lay it all at Mitch McConnell and the Republicans’ feet. The Democrats practice their own form of obstructionism as well, it’s just more subtle. Democrats harp on what is “politically possible” as an excuse to obstruct progress. Take health care, Democrats are big fans of saying that a single payer system would never work. The problem is they have been saying it for so long that if you look back, you realize we could have had it by now if they hadn’t been making excuses to not try. Obama, could have come out in 2006–2008 saying “healthcare should be a right,” it wouldn’t have become law overnight, but imagine how far along that conversation would be by now, with Democratic leaders championing it in their platform for the last decade. Instead of the giveaway to the insurance industry that was “Obamacare,” we could be ten months away from passing a single payer system. Democrats use what is “politically possible” as an excuse to not try, they use not trying to stall progress, and they use that lack of progress to lower voters’ expectations. That’s a worse kind of obstructionism than anything the Republicans, do, because it obstructs the way people think, not just what government does. It’s a sickness, it kills hope.

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